


Break, O My Soul

by demonstarrr26



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Childhood Friends, Daddy Issues, Friends to Enemies to Lovers, Gay, M/M, Mutual Pining, Past Abuse, Pining, Sad Backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23088460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonstarrr26/pseuds/demonstarrr26
Summary: After the sword of Sargeras splits Azeroth asunder, Wrathion seeks to prove to Anduin that he's not corrupted like his father by helping heal the broken world. But the re-united childhood friends have grown into vastly different men, and to mend a planet they must first mend their hearts . . . and the bond between themThis will be long, expect angst and pining.
Relationships: Wrathion/Anduin Wrynn
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

Wrathion hadn’t intended for the world to end. Not that it would stop anyone blaming him.  
By dumb luck, he was in Auberdine when the Breaking hit. Rumors had brought him north seeking a void-touched satyr, but demons were far from his thoughts when he rose that day. In the inn overlooking the docks, where the gently-lapping sea smelled of jasmine blossom and the shadow of the worldtree cast the sky in perpetual violet shade, he lay in bed, lazy, draped beneath a hungover high-elf with pale yellow hair.  
“Orva?” he asked, sliding out from under the night’s lover and waving the orc woman forward. The Blacktalon commander stood a discrete distance away. He’d rented her a bed of her own, but she’d spurned it to stand guard. Like a dragon needed mortal protectors.  
Only he did. Millions hungered to spill the blood that had once sundered the world, even if Wrathion had been born long after the first Cataclysm and the ensuing war that wiped out every other black dragon. For all his power and knowledge, he was vulnerable to sword and spell. And even more vulnerable to a pretty face.  
“Take him to the warlock and wipe his memory,” he commanded, jabbing a thumb at the sleeping elf. “We can’t have anyone knowing we were here.”  
“And you can’t have anyone knowing you’re a bottom,” she answered, and hoisted the sleeper atop her broad shoulders, the leather spikes on her pauldrons worn smooth from use. “Or about that conversation you had with him last night. You looked angry.”  
He’d ordered two bottles of Darnassian Red, pulled the boy into a shady corner—the inn walls, grown from living trees over centuries in the kal’dorei style, had no shortage of those—and drunkenly confided the fears he couldn’t calm. How he’d traveled the world for years now, alone save for the Blacktalon cultists and a succession of lovers left behind. Plundering crumbled towers, slipping through abandoned vaults, once stealing a ring off a goblin trade-prince’s finger.  
All in search of a cure. An inoculation. Some magic that would ward him against ever succumbing to the old gods’ enthrallment. Save him from his father’s, his whole family’s, fate. _If the great Neltharion, Earth-Warder, blessed by the Titans, so easily fell into darkness, what will become of me? _  
He’d cried. A little. The tears had sizzled and steamed on his lashes. It might have looked like anger, from Orva’s distant view.  
The Blacktalons had defected from the apocalyptic death cult of the Twilight Hammer. Outcasts who’d sought to obliterate the world that hurt them, they’d found a reason to live after the black dragons’ death in protecting their last surviving son. The closest to family he’d ever had, but not quite.  
Hard to see someone as family when they worshipped you. Impossible to confess your fears and weaknesses in people who needed you to be their god.  
He paid his tab in gold he’d swiped from an archdruid’s mossy purse. On foot, they trudged up the winding, crumbled pavement leading into the storm-swept hill. Here, trees shattered in the Cataclysm stood besides ruins tumbled in the Shattering, worn soft by moss and rain. _We are all the children of a broken world. _  
Small wonder his Blacktalon followers had once worshiped destruction itself. Orva, with her strength and axes, the Twins, high elf survivors of the Third War who spoke to none but each other, and Cambet, a human warlock who glowed faint green from the fel magic he’d injected. In silence, they slipped through the ruins, following the leaping imp Cambet kept tethered on a spider-silk thread. Quiet as if speaking of their cracks would make them crumble. _But once my quest is done, my mind will be as solid as a mountain. _  
“We’re here, master,” hissed the imp. “The satyr Toviax dwells near.”  
“The Black Prince is your true master,” Cambet insisted. “I only work the fel energies at his bidding.”  
_You’ve wiped drunken vomit off my lips with a wet cloth _, Wrathion thought, stifling a sigh. Cambet still kept a bit of the refuse in a vial at his throat.  
“Hold up,” Orva said. The Twins drew their matching rapiers. “Something’s wrong. I—”  
Leaves crackled. A shadowy fist, void incarnate, closed about her chest and pinned her in place. A high voice cackled as the furry, horned satyr dropped from the trees.  
“I am Toviax of the Lonely Hill,” he said, “and I’ll be lonelier still once I’ve ate you.”  
The Twins leapt, lovely as flung darts. Green flames sprung up around them, pinning them in a ward. Cambet cursed and yanked his thread, decapitating his treacherous imp in a plume of green fire before the satyr’s spell unceremoniously snapped him into the form of a bleating sheep.  
Wrathion drew his dagger and charged, shrugging minor spells off the scales sprouting beneath his jacket. His heart pounded, brow sweating—he hated the inelegance of solving problems at swordpoint—but Toviax only laughed, holding up his hands in lazy surrender. “The last black dragon. Call off your goons and speak to me like kin. We’re brothers in corruption.”  
“I am not corrupted,” Wrathion said. He’d meant to sound defiant, but it came out as a plea. An excuse. _I’m not corrupted. Not tainted. _How many times had he called that as a child, when boots and sticks had battered his ribs? _The red dragons purified me in the egg. I don’t hear the old gods whisper. I didn’t cause the Cataclysm. Don’t hurt me, I’m not corrupted! _  
To which the SI:7 agents assigned to guard him would answer _not yet. _  
“Pity,” Toviax said. “You’re too pretty, with those tall cheekbones and that long, elegant nose. Some corruption would balance that out.” The left side of his face sparked and wavered with scars. Shadows danced over flesh where void magic had bit a chunk from his nose.”  
“They say you’re an expert in such matters.” He left the jab at his looks alone. “That you studied the old gods even before the Shattering. I don’t seek their power. Only a way to ward myself against it. To close my mind to their whispers for good.” _So I can be good. So I can go home. _White towers flashed against his eyelids as his lashes fluttered shut. Stormwind shouldn’t still be home to him, not when he’d been tortured beneath its towers and canals. Still. Home wasn’t a place, but a person . . .__  
“You can find what you seek,” the ancient satyr gibbered, malicious even as Wrathion’s heart leapt for joy. “A cloak of dreams. A chain of midnights. Garb yourself and stand beneath Elune’s dark eye. Never again will any power but your own shape your destiny.”  
Wrathion’s eyes narrowed. Long, black brows like throwing daggers. “Why would you give me what I seek for free? All sorts of pretty faces give me presents, but you’ve been old and wizened since Nordrassil was a sapling. I assume you don’t expect repayment in kisses.”  
“Impudent whelp.” The satyr smiled, revealing broken, jagged teeth. “I tell you as a curse, child. One more dagger in your new and tender hide. I tell you, so as the world fractures, you know you might protect your heart at the cost of your soul.”  
Riddles. Hairs prickled down his neck. He loved a good riddle, but his thief’s instincts told him he was out of time. A watchman was coming. Judgement.  
He had to escape before the hammer fell.  
“Tell me what you mean,” he growled. His forearms bubbled like molten rock. Thick black talons dug into the satyr’s throat. “Or I slice you up and feed you living to my cultists. They love a good ritual.”  
It came. A quake. A rumble through time and space. An echo spoken in a tongue of Light, the language of the naru and Titans and all the shapers of the universe. The seal placed on his bloodline at the planet’s birth, weakened but never discarded, hissed like steam in his ears.  
“The father . . . of demons,” gasped Toviax, clawing at his arms, his chest. Black webbing shot through his veins. His muscles wasted, twisting into bare cords against his bones. He collapsed to his knees. “Sargaeras . . . promised me . . .” With a final gasp, he dissolved into sulfur-scented ashes.  
“What was that about?” Orva demanded as the fel magic holding her dissolved.  
“The Black Prince struck down the demon with his great magic!” Cambet proclaimed. “All hail the heir to earth and stone!”  
Wrathion wondered if he’d get away with taking credit, or if he’d just look silly. “Something great has happened in the cosmos,” he settled on, speaking like it was some wise pronouncement. “The Titans won a victory against—”  
The elements screamed.  
Not in pain. Not in agony. The sound that escapes when atoms split apart and new universes birth in fire.  
A wave of force punched him in the back. Gravity flickered, on and off. _It’s not supposed to do that _, Wrathion thought—and then his eardrums burst as white light flooded the world.  
The light of the planet’s own heart, splitting. He knew, though he didn’t know how. His essence was linked to the earth he stood on—and his heart knew very well the feel of breaking.  
Space reached to swallow him up, and he fell. As the blood turned to silt in his veins and oxygen squeezed from his lungs, he remembered a smiling blond boy and thought _I failed you, Anduin. I never made myself safe enough to come back. ___________________


	2. Chapter 2

The day the world ended, High King Anduin Wyrnn prepared to claim his reign’s greatest victory.   
Not that it would be his victory. That honor belonged to Illidan Stormrage, who’d gone to free the Titan pantheon of Sargeras’ binding and muster the creators of the universe for a final, glorious act of sealing the Mad Titan forever in time. It belonged to the draenei, who’d fought and fled the demonic Legion for millenia, and to every brave warrior—including Anduin’s father—who had fallen heroically in the caustic, battering war.   
Anduin himself hadn’t raised a blade in combat since the Broken Shore, not since claiming the great sword Shalamayne from his father’s body and . . . mostly using it to clean his fingernails. The sole heir to a dynasty—the sole figure with the will and legitimacy to hold the struggling Alliance together—couldn’t risk falling to a stray felguard.   
No one had ever stopped his father from fighting. But Varian Wrynn had been a warrior without peer. Anduin—well, had peers. In the sparring ring, in war strategy, in magic. A king was meant to set an example for the people he led. Yet the hunger of doubt gnawed at his stomach day and night. He ruled through no merit of his own, but thanks to the accident of his birth. He had nothing to give the Alliance save his very average swordwork and his very average mind. If he’d failed here—gone wrong in trusting Illidan, in delegating so much power to the draenei and the Kirin Tor to win this war—he’d watch not just his kingdom, but the whole cosmos burn before the fel fire of the Mad Titan devoured his lungs.  
I wish Wrathion was here, he thought, watching through the Prophet Velen’s scrying orb as Illidan and a group of expendable mercenaries beat the soul of the dead world Argus into submission. Bodies packed the dark, cramped war room, nervous voices low. The king nibbled a piece of hard cheese, slowly sucking on each chunk, as the spymaster Mathias Shaw sharpened a dagger beside him. It rang against the whetstone, sparking like a silver tongue   
Daggers could do nothing against a titan. Not all the guns and magic in Stormwind. Only distraction. Picturing a kinder time, a chessboard in a courtyard, sunshine and another boy’s shy smile. My greatest accomplishment, teasing that out of him. A ghostly grin played around his lips. He’d never felt more strong or certain than around the black dragon. Never more like the person—the king—he was born to be.   
“We’re winning,” Alleria Windrunner pronounced. A victorious hiss, an echoing whisper every soul in the room could hear.   
Anduin shivered. “How do you know?” Through the crystal, he could only see the mercenaries impaled by spikes.   
“Time and space unravels about them,” she spoke, reverently. “The Titans draw power from every atom of the universe for a final working.” Her lower jaw dissolved into shadow for a heartbeat—an affect of the void magic she and many of her high elf brethren had embraced. In Anduin’s priestly training, he’d learned how the holy Light crafted the very fabric of reality—and how the void, the shadow, sliced it up and stitched it together new.  
Void magic wasn’t evil. Not by nature. In practiced hands, it made a powerful tool to reshape energy and matter. But those who indulged in remaking the world from whimsey often found themselves remade. Grown into great hulking monsters. Driven to cackling madness. Surrendered to the hungry forces seeping like oil beneath the skin of the world.  
Light fit Anduin, like a favorite coat he could don with his eyes shut. He dared not imagine how he’d look garbed in shadows. Durotan. Arthas. Azshara. Names infamous in history. Good rulers who’d sought greatness and ruined nations in their dark bargains for more power. He might have been doomed to a legacy of incompetence, but at least he’d never feed his people demon blood or trade their souls for dominion over the tides.  
“Look!” Velen gasped, ancient voice cracking. Lightning crackled about his scrying orb as the Mad Titan appeared. Colossal, fel-streaked. Beautiful as sin. Anduin’s breath caught, torn between terror and awe. Every floating dust mote in the war room froze. Not a breath stirred the silence.  
Ropes of light, wide as continents, lashed about Sargeras. Pinning him. Binding him. Illidan lifted his war glaives and struck a final blow. The explosion shook the heavens, echoing in the holy runes etched on Anduin’s armor. A song. A chorus of creation and destruction as oblivion swallowed Sargeras whole.   
We’ve won, he told himself, barely breathing. We’ve won and—  
The Mad Titan swung his sword home in a final blow. The ground beneath the keep shuddered as, in the scrying orb, the blade sunk through Silithus—and kept going.   
“It can’t be!” gasped a high, fearful voice. A shaman collapsed to their knees, squeezing their temples and screaming like they’d been stabbed.   
But it was, Anduin realized as Sargeras vanished into void. The little blue and green planet, splintering along red fault lines like a crumbling cake  
He should feel something. Do something. But all his attention was caught in a hissing, screaming rattle bouncing off his eardrums—no, off the inside of his brain, the part of him trained to sense the holy light.   
Death, he realized. So many, so quick and awful, that every passage caused reality to quaver like a struck drum. And somewhere amidst the screaming torrent of vaporized souls, the flood that cut his brain and sliced his selfhood—  
A soul like a mote of lava. Like metal and steam. A newborn planet, ever changing.   
An anchor in the storm.   
A presence and a rage that sparked him back to life, because he could not let that fire go out.  
Forgive me, holy light, he prayed. Anduin had one tool, and didn’t hesitate to use it. Chains of solid diamond, carbon crackling into shape, whipped through six dimensions as his murmured void-spell scratched a rusty tear across the holy face of light. Catching about a soul that shifted, form to form, like a cloud of ashes.   
You won’t escape me, Wrathion. Not again.  
Silicon snapped into jagged order, like soldiers, lightning-struck. Glass snapped tight about the gas of him. Anduin pulled his target—moving it—rewriting reality as the light itself sparked angrily in protest. Two spaces merged into one.   
The glass appeared in Anduin’s hands and shattered. The whirling dust cloud grew tall and solid. For a heartbeat, a flicker of nervous normal pierced the storm of death and magic. Had he summoned a black dragon into the war room?   
A lean-muscled, dark-skinned man with messy hair and a long coat stumbled backwards from the cloud and swooned. Anduin caught him, pulling him close to his chest. Felt a heartbeat pound, irregular yet solid. Magically real.  
He’s grown so tall, Anduin thought—but he had grown taller still, and could fit the other man’s narrow chest against one arm. The king didn’t understand why he felt compelled to hold the other man, but couldn’t let go.   
A new fear sunk in him, deep as the keep’s trembling foundations, setting tracks of sweat running down his forehead, bands of muscle tight about his chests. That his whole war council, every leader the Alliance had assembled to witness their victory and now their apocalypse, would see him like this. Exposed, all his insufficiency laid bare. Their failure of a high king, grinning like a fool as his world died underneath him, all because he could clutch safe the son of the first monster to break a planet’s heart.


	3. Chapter 3

Anduin forced the smile off his face. This was a crisis, a chaos, and the notorious Black Prince—prince of thieves, robbers, and cultists—carried chaos in his train. He fed healing magic to the limp body in his arms. 

“It’s you,” whispered Wrathion’s wavering lips. Like he’d been caught on the edge of dreaming. Then his red eyes, brimming like the lips of volcanos, snapped open and smoldered. He leapt to his feet “Where am I? Where are my followers?” 

“You were the only soul I could grab,” Anduin said. “And you’re in the war room, under the keep—” 

“Stormwind Keep? How dare you bring me here?” 

“How dare you leave me?” Anduin shouted, then bit his lip. ‘Me’ was the entirely wrong word. It wasn’t about him. Nothing was about him. Only the kingdom mattered. “How dare you abandon and betray the Alliance?” 

“Stop this, you two!” Prophet Velen slid between them, hands lifted. Shame lit Anduin’s cheeks pink. “We have mere minutes to prevent an apocalypse. Don’t let your petty bickering kill the world beneath you.” 

“Cracks run though the Dream,” whispered Archdruid Malfurion. “The planes of soul and the elements. Splintering.” 

Wrathion hissed. Pressing a fist against his lower back like he’d just been stabbed. “Mulgore. Durotan. I can feel it—Orgrimmar is burning.” 

The glow in Anduin’s cheeks felt like the surface of a star. He was meant to be better than this. He needed to be better than this. His father would have been better than this. Once, it would have meant something to Anduin, that Kalimdor’s largest city was on fire. But he had no room left in his heart for the Horde. Barely enough for the work before him. 

“To the mage tower,” he commanded. “Every magic user, every druid and shaman, every priest with affinity for the void. We can weave the elemental planes into a shield to protect the physical one. That’s why—that’s why I summoned Wrathion here to help.” 

“And here I thought you missed my charming personality,” Wrathion purred. The heat in Anduin’s cheeks was universe-ending. He pivoted on a heel and marched from the hall. 

Armed guards fell into line as the king and his entourage swept through the streets, clearing a path as commoners ran panicking past crumbling towers and wave-swept canals. The air tasted of brimstone. Anduin couldn’t help glancing at what had once been the ruined park Wrathion’s father Deathwing had destroyed when he’d emerged from the depths of the planet and broken it. The Cataclysm was one of his earliest memories. The air had also smelled of death and burning that day. 

“Your Highness,” Mathias Shaw urged, coming up at his elbow. “Let me take the dragon to a cell. There’s a dozen warrants for his arrest across the Eastern Kingdoms alone—” 

“What’s a few robberies in the face of the apocalypse?” 

“Proof you can’t trust him. He’s run from you before.” 

Old scars tugged at his heart. Anduin told himself to ignore them. “I can’t trust him to help me—” and the truth burned like acid— “but he’s no fool. He’ll help himself. There’ll be no one left to rob or pillage if the planet collapses.” 

“Sensible. But sense didn’t stop his father.” Bitterness brimmed in Shaw’s voice. Both his parents had died in the first Cataclysm. Small wonder he’d hated Wrathion so; had shown nothing but violence toward the last black dragon, even as a babe. 

Anduin had never understood hatred. Even now, drained of all capacity for feeling, he wished no violence on the Horde or on the forces that had split open his world. He just didn’t—couldn’t—care. He had nothing left to him but duty and purpose. 

In that, at least, he could be the perfect king. 

** 

I would like permission to stop, vomit, and cry, Wrathion thought as the guards marched him up the spiraling ramp of the mage tower. His stomach roiled like he’d swallowed rocks. His skin itched where the void had knitted him back together. 

Worst of all, he was alone. Devoid of his cultists. Surrounded by Alliance leaders who saw him as a traitor, a rogue, an ingrate. And Anduin. Looking at him like a stranger, a tool. Plucked from oblivion to help subvert the apocalypse. He’d always used to smile at Wrathion. The only one in the whole world who ever did. 

But a king couldn’t smile as the world trembled under his feet. Violet shingles dropped off the rooftops of the mage district. Puffs of blue and white smoke billowed out broken windows as glass and reagent vials shattered. The sun was growing dark, even in midday. The wound in the planet ached like his own heart breaking. 

They had to save the world, first. And once Wrathion had helped, maybe, maybe that smile would come back to him. 

“Hurry!” Grand Magister Umbric shouted at the center of the Wizards’ Sanctum. The portals housed in arches around the great hall sparked and sizzled with lightning, magic surging and failing as the great network of leylines trembled. A ball of pure void, of nothingness, already hung in his hands, sucking at all eyes. Three archmages, garbed in the violet eye of the Kirin Tor, fed streams of arcane energy into his anchor, turning it into a brilliant white crystal so bright if burned. “Magic, now—whatever you’ve got!” 

Malfurion and his escorts raised feathered arms. The scent of sap hung in the air as druidic magic flowed into the anchor. The strength of growing things, of whispers and dreams. Kalecgos the Blue, in human guise, feeding the arcane energy of transformation and change into the spell. Totems shimmered as the shamans invoked elemental spirits. Wrathion closed his eyes, braved himself, and sunk his thoughts into the bedrock below. 

It sung to him, even as it boiled and burned. Our son. Our savior. Though in the wide world he was one creature, alone, in the earth he was a mighty mountain. Many were the days he’d dreamed of giving himself over to its call, of melting into magma and slag, drifting for centuries on its underground rivers. But false and bitter notes reached up through the song. Pockets of void energy, dwelling deep beneath the planet’s crust. Old gods, they were called, and they rejoiced and gurgled as the planet fell. The ultimate source of remaking. 

The voices that had corrupted his father. The forces Wrathion did not dare to touch. He could channel the shamans’ magic, guide it seamlessly into the elemental plane. But if he went deeper, reshaped the broken planet like clay, the creatures of the deeps would sink their hooks and tentacles inside him. Making him into their tool to devour what was left of the world. 

Only a great fool would ask why Wrathion preferred stealth and daggers to the magic in his blood. 

About the magic of the raging elements, Alleria and Umbric, knit a thread of void—a weaving, a stitching, re-defining the rules of existence. Letting air flow, soil bloom, life continue. Sketched in bold ambition across the shifting stars. Trembling and quaking as they sought to spin the power into reality. 

“We need you, Wrathion,” Umbric said. “The great wells of void magic beneath the surface—that’s yours for the taking. We need that energy to stabilize the shield.” 

“The…the old gods and their creatures?” Sweat dropped down his brow. His voice broke, even though he told himself to stay cool. “It’s dangerous.” 

“We’re all about to die,” Alleria shouted. “Do something! We’ll deal with the corruption later!” 

The corruption. His heart stuttered. He knew he shouldn’t hesitate. To make this sacrifice, for the world, for the sake of his followers if they lived—for the tall, armored king who stood just behind him. But once he touched that magic, Wrathion feared he would become the corruption they feared. The Alliance dealt with corruption at the point of a blade. “I..I..” 

A hand slipped in his. A thousand swords of light and shadow pierced the crawling creatures in the planet’s crust. They howled. Hissing. Dissolving. Energy tore skyward, slicing through rock and soil and everything it touched, racing into the heavens and into the void elves’ spell. 

At last—at blessed last—the shaking stilled. 

“Thank you, dragon boy,” huffed Alleria sarcastically, panting on her knees from the force of the magic. 

But he hadn’t been the one who’d done it. 

Wrathion’s eyes flickered open just in time to see Anduin pull his hand away. His heart lurched. His breath caught, pinned on the edge of unbelieving. 

It couldn’t be. His perfect prince would never touch magic so dangerous. So corrosive to the soul. 

But how else, save for using void magic, could Anduin have swept him halfway across the world in a heartbeat? 

Wrathion hadn’t seen Anduin in years. Not since his father died. Not since his failed peace talks with Sylvanas and the Horde broke into violence. He’d crossed the world to find ways to make himself safe for the boy he remembered best of all, the one point of light in his dark childhood. 

And if that boy no longer existed, for all his cosmic strength and power, Wrathion was nothing but a very lonely fool.


End file.
